Ashwagandha for Androgens

It wouldn't be Brovember talking about adaptogens and tonic herbs that are super potent for when it comes to men's health, without talking about ashwagandha - the Ayurvedic Rasayana that is also hot right now, especially with men's health practitioners. Read and watch on to see why ashwag is so beneficial for men.

Of course, to all our women's health practitioners out there as well, it's such a potent and beautiful herb for women's health. But far out, it's a good, in fact, really incredible herb for men's health. And so when you look at men's health practitioners and naturopaths, along with guys who are into performance and optimisation and bio-hacking and all this stuff, of course they're going to be looking at hormonal optimisation. And ashwagandha is such a beautiful androgenic herb. And the data is so incredible. We've got an article called Ashwagandha for Potent Men's Health if you want all the data behind a lot of these benefits.

Basically, we're looking at ashwagandha's ability to help in the maintenance of and nurturing of the hormonal cascade down towards the point where we are getting an expression of testosterone and DHEA; ashwagandha is absolutely incredible. And linked to that, when you get that optimisation of your androgens, and this is where I think the practitioners are really loving it so much, because yes, in Ayurveda as a Rasayana, ashwagandha was documented to imbue with the power and strength of a horse, right? We'll get to flavour down the track, but that might be one of the reasons it kind of tastes like a sweaty horse, but we'll get there. And we'll talk about why you want that taste from your ashwagandha.

But when you look at that kind of level of androgenic hormonal optimisation, you are going to see very, very powerful markers and outcomes of endurance and strength starting to go up. And it's very impressive when it comes to ashwagandha. Like lots of Yang Jing herbs, right? And you see it with the data with eucommia bark, and cordyceps, and deer antler. (Check out The Amazing Benefits of Cordyceps Mushroom here and you can dive in to the epic health benefits of SuperFeast Deer Antler here.)

Ashwagandha has a lot of data behind it, as the others do, but ashwagandha especially. And so I feel like that's why it's really embedded itself and rightfully so, as a tonic herb and an adaptogen which is going to really not muck around and give you the benefits, especially if you're doing other things in your lifestyle to help optimise your hormonal cascade. And then beyond that, it's been such a potent endurance herb and been a herb that's so great for you achieving athletic gains (gosh, hate using the term 'gains'!)

At the other side of it, being a nervine, it's a really nice and unusual aspect about ashwagandha, of how powerful it is at getting in there, and helping to, as a carminative does, it's a nourish to the nervous system, and basically gets you into a nice parasympathetic place. It's why it's so good before sleep (we've got the perfect sleepy moon time milk recipe here). It's why it's so great if you're on that side of really being in your head, and really adrenalising, and using that energy to get through the day, and you're realising that perhaps that's not the most sustainable way to attack life... Achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. And you want more of an ability to get out there, dripping in testosterone and power, but do it very calmly and effectively, right? Not reacting to things but taking powerful action. That takes a whole lifestyle as well, and a meditative practice and the whole shebang. But having herbs being able to contribute to that, ashwagandha is one of those.

And so some of you boys might like it in the morning if you're feeling really neurotic and your monkey mind's going on. So some boys like ashwagandha and reishi in the morning for that. Others prefer at night to really help them get down and have a really deep sleep, down-regulate the nervous system in that way that it's going to allow you to go down that deep dive and so you can get a nice restorative sleep. The other aspect, the data's really clear on it, is to make a man's essence really potent. And so for increasing quality of sperm and increasing sperm count, a beautiful, beautiful tonic. And that reason alone, it's worth you having it there in your apothecary.

Flavour-wise... at SuperFeast, remember, I don't like isolating any active constituents. And it's one of the things with ashwagandha. Tonic herbs, you can get some pockets of the Chinese herbal community that are always focused on full spectrum. But out of Ayurveda, it exists, but I really did find that it was hard to get an ashwagandha that: A) wasn't just a ground up root, or B) wasn't standardised to a particular percentage of active constituent (read about our stance on why we never standardise here).

So when you get a really high quality Di Dao ashwagandha that's extracted in very specific ways to optimise the ashwagandha (we're talking specific times, length, and temperatures for this high pressure water extraction). This whole process, I mean, it's patented. The partners that we work with to extract at our Chinese extraction facility, what they ensure is that we capture the volatile and essential oils, (which are basically in alchemy, seen as the soul.) By the way, we do this for all of our herbs, but it's important for ashwagandha to know that we've captured that essential oil, which is normally lost. And then that's re-introduced at the end. And that's why the flavour is so potent in this ashwagandha. As well as it being a full spectrum, not isolating particular compounds at the detriment of losing other compounds or losing the natural ratio, we want a full-spectrum powder.

The flavour that comes out, ashwagandha is a potent flavour. Charlotte, Flavour Bae, she's our mate who's over in LA, and in the style of wine tasting notes, will do them for our herbs. And ashwagandha, it was a campfire in a dry pine forest, bitter greens and also white ash. And you can be like, "Yeah, that's definitely there. That bit of greens and that white ash." And as I was messaging her, I was like, "Oh, feel free to unleash a little bit on ashwagandha because some people can't... The flavour's kind of hard to handle." And she's like, "Yeah, I was kind of finding it hard." There was one pretty full on note that she said, I won't mention. But one was like, "Yeah, it was hard to kind of not say field of cows." And I'm like, "Yeah, field of cows is quite appropriate." I kind of call it like a... It's like a sweaty horse. It's got that. It does have that grassy note. Some people can really handle it. Some people really can't. Just lower the dose if you can't handle it. You need to put it with lots of aromatic spices. Get it into a chai, hit it with a chai. Hit it with really aromatic spices. Lay it on with like camomile, or lemon balm, or vanilla. Just make sure the dose is appropriate. You can split up the dose between morning and night and just lower how much you're doing because you don't want to.... Obviously compliance is key. But it's also, remember, it's very powerful. You don't have to do as much as when you have the ones that you've had previously, where either the ashwagandha hasn't been extracted at all, it's just been the powder and not really doing much for you. Or those that have an isolated and standardised, active constituency.

Remember, when the herb's in its full energetic, natural ratio, you're going to get, especially long term, greater potency. The herb is famous in antiquity for a reason and that's what we're trying to stick to and that's what Di Dao truly is.

So stick with it. It's worth... If you're going to be on ashwagandha, be on one that tastes nice and stanky, and that you know has the volatile oils, and has all the good stuff. So boys enjoy that. Sperm count. Testosterone, DHEA, nice, calm, nervous system, endurance power. It's a good one to have in your life. And if this download wasn't enough for you, there's a cool article on all the amazing health benefits associated with ashwaghanda you can check out here. Check out our potent SuperFeast Ashwagandha below: